[neilv]

Elon Musk: "For maximum confusion, I'm renaming Twitter to X."

Fediverse: "Hold my beer."

Every time I try to suggest someone use the Fediverse, I have to say about 2 sentences just to name the thing I'm talking about, which they're more likely to know as "Mastodon". I don't see how pulling a "the artist formerly known as Prince" will help this branding problem, rather than hurt further.

Advocating this logo-in-text for branding is as confusing to me as the people who keep self-destructively saying "free software", to mean a very important and huge distinction from what every reasonable person assumes that "free software" means.

It seems less like evangelism, and more like exclusionary -- a small in-group shibboleth, or secret handshake.

[cmrdporcupine]

"Simplification" via centralization and convenience is how we ended up with Facebook and similar basically owning the Internet. People no longer using email or hosting or using webpages "because it's too confusing" and instead using Facebook or Twitter for everything. Everything accessed via "apps" on closed platforms. Gov't agencies and news orgs without their own online presence, just broadcasting via Musknet or YouTube. Schools or daycares sharing critical information over closed Facebook groups. Mass privacy violation & data collection. Mass disinformation campaigns over the same centralized mediums. Unmoderated hate speech or climate denial given giant-sized megaphones to hit naive audiences of grandparents and others unable to separate information wheat from chaff, because they're naively trusting the "simple" service they're endlessly scrolling through.

Usenet, e-mail, IRC, MUDs, MOOs, Gopher (and before that BBS) etc all required multiple sentences to explain, but they are the literal roots of the Internet, and how many of us got our start. The effort to "web-scale" and "simplify" is directly implicated in monopolization and shitification.

I'd rather have complexity than garbage.

[neilv]

I'm with you in principle.

But isn't sloppiness of naming how you end up with people knowing only "Mastodon", not the Fediverse?

All those technologies you mentioned had names so you could start to talk about them, and could keep them straight. (Otherwise, we might all be using "IE" now instead of the Web, which by now would be some thoroughly proprietary nth generation evolution of ActiveX.)

When I want to explain the Fediverse to someone, I sometimes need multiple sentences to just give it a name, so people can start anchoring concepts, before I can start saying what it is. (Otherwise, a few minutes later, "Wait, have you been talking about Mastodon?")

This is almost as frustrating as people who insist on still saying "free software", long after the confusion has already been pointed out, sometimes seemingly whenever saying "free software" would be most counterproductive to their goals.

Sometimes there's a reasonable explanation, like a particular person has trouble forming a mental model of someone else, or a particular person just thinks substantially differently than most people. Both of which are absolutely true of a lot of early true-believers in these circles. Or it's an isolated incident, when a person who would normally realize that, merely missed it.

Embracing whimsy and differences, and understanding that mistakes happen, are all good. But let's not elevate that, over the goals of those same people, to the point of sabotaging their goals.

(Now, if the goals of certain Fediverse three-stars-pyramid hieroglyph secret-society people are actually to make it a closed in-group, you could make a strong argument for that school of thought. But Fediverse people who want to bring more people into the fold, or who want it not to lose even some of the popularity it already has, need to be very different about evangelizing.)

[01HNNWZ0MV43FF]

It's not a company, nobody leads it

This is sort of like meeting one vegan protester and deciding you won't eat any vegetable because you didn't like them

[neilv]

> This is sort of like meeting one vegan protester and deciding you won't eat any vegetable because you didn't like them

So I'm saying "Don't listen to that one vegan protestor who is kicking that puppy, because the effect will be that even fewer people will eat their vegetables."

In any case, everyone in the nebulous Fediverse who doesn't want to remain only a fringe-iverse, would do well to collectively decide upon and use a viable name that outsiders will see.

[krapp]

I think this symbol is kind of pointless and I doubt anyone is going to use it "like the Prince symbol," so I don't think this is really even an issue. That said, there's nothing wrong with being fringe, or preferring slow growth. After all, Hacker News' entire design ethos and cultural imperative is keeping Eternal September at bay by aggressively gatekeeping against the unwashed hordes of normies and Redditors and moderating against anything "true hackers" shouldn't find interesting.

I don't want the masses to ruin the Fediverse the way they ruined everything else. I don't want influencers, marketers, grifters, shills, stooges, incels, nazis, predators and bots proliferating into every online space like cockroaches. I don't want the Fediverse to be captured and transformed into a Skinner box of endorphine-dripping two minutes hate struggle sessions, misinformation, propaganda, viral marketing and vapid memes. Most people coming to the Fediverse are explicitly doing so to escape all of that.